TY - JOUR
T1 - Interactive effects of linguistic abstraction and stimulus statistics in the online modulation of neural speech encoding
AU - Lau, Joseph C.Y.
AU - Wong, Patrick C.M.
AU - Chandrasekaran, Bharath
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant 1R01-DC-013315 (to B. Chandrasekaran), Research Grants Council of Hong Kong General Research Fund 14117514 (to P.C.M. Wong), Global Parent Child Resource Centre Limited (to P.C.M. Wong), Lui Che Woo Institute of Innovative Medicine (to P. C. M. Wong), and Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation (to P.C.M. Wong). We also wish to thank Christopher Chan, Kirin Cheung, Tianfan Liu, Grace Pan, Binghui Shen, Xiaohui Sun, and Yi Wu for their assistance with data collection.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant 1R01-DC-013315 (to B. Chandrasekaran), Research Grants Council of Hong Kong General Research Fund 14117514 (to P.C.M. Wong), Global Parent Child Resource Centre Limited (to P.C.M. Wong), Lui Che Woo Institute of Innovative Medicine (to P. C. M. Wong), and Dr. Stanley Ho Medical Development Foundation (to P.C.M. Wong). We also wish to thank Christopher Chan, Kirin Cheung, Tianfan Liu, Grace Pan, Binghui Shen, Xiaohui Sun, and Yi Wu for their assistance with data collection.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
PY - 2019/5/31
Y1 - 2019/5/31
N2 - Speech processing is highly modulated by context. Prior studies examining frequency-following responses (FFRs), an electrophysiological ‘neurophonic’ potential that faithfully reflects phase-locked activity from neural ensembles within the auditory network, have demonstrated that stimulus context modulates the integrity of speech encoding. The extent to which context-dependent encoding reflects general auditory properties or interactivities between statistical and higher-level linguistic processes remains unexplored. Our study examined whether speech encoding, as reflected by FFRs, is modulated by abstract phonological relationships between a stimulus and surrounding contexts. FFRs were elicited to a Mandarin rising-tone syllable (/ji-TR/, ‘second’) randomly presented with other syllables in three contexts from 17 native listeners. In a contrastive context, /ji-TR/ occurred with meaning-contrastive high-level-tone syllables (/ji-H/, ‘one’). In an allotone context, TR occurred with dipping-tone syllables /ji-D/, a non-meaning-contrastive variant of /ji-TR/. In a repetitive context, the same /ji-TR/ occurred with other speech tokens of /ji-TR/. Consistent with prior work, neural tracking of /ji-TR/ pitch contour was more faithful in the repetitive condition wherein /ji-TR/ occurred more predictably (p = 1) than in the contrastive condition (p = 0.34). Crucially, in the allotone context, neural tracking of /ji-TR/ was more accurate relative to the contrastive context, despite both having an identical transitional probability (p = 0.34). Mechanistically, the non-meaning-contrastive relationship may have augmented the probability to /ji-TR/ occurrence in the allotone context. Results indicate online interactions between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms, which facilitate speech perception. Such interactivities may predictively fine-tune incoming speech encoding using linguistic and statistical information from prior context.
AB - Speech processing is highly modulated by context. Prior studies examining frequency-following responses (FFRs), an electrophysiological ‘neurophonic’ potential that faithfully reflects phase-locked activity from neural ensembles within the auditory network, have demonstrated that stimulus context modulates the integrity of speech encoding. The extent to which context-dependent encoding reflects general auditory properties or interactivities between statistical and higher-level linguistic processes remains unexplored. Our study examined whether speech encoding, as reflected by FFRs, is modulated by abstract phonological relationships between a stimulus and surrounding contexts. FFRs were elicited to a Mandarin rising-tone syllable (/ji-TR/, ‘second’) randomly presented with other syllables in three contexts from 17 native listeners. In a contrastive context, /ji-TR/ occurred with meaning-contrastive high-level-tone syllables (/ji-H/, ‘one’). In an allotone context, TR occurred with dipping-tone syllables /ji-D/, a non-meaning-contrastive variant of /ji-TR/. In a repetitive context, the same /ji-TR/ occurred with other speech tokens of /ji-TR/. Consistent with prior work, neural tracking of /ji-TR/ pitch contour was more faithful in the repetitive condition wherein /ji-TR/ occurred more predictably (p = 1) than in the contrastive condition (p = 0.34). Crucially, in the allotone context, neural tracking of /ji-TR/ was more accurate relative to the contrastive context, despite both having an identical transitional probability (p = 0.34). Mechanistically, the non-meaning-contrastive relationship may have augmented the probability to /ji-TR/ occurrence in the allotone context. Results indicate online interactions between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms, which facilitate speech perception. Such interactivities may predictively fine-tune incoming speech encoding using linguistic and statistical information from prior context.
KW - Allotones
KW - Context-dependent plasticity
KW - Frequency-following response (FFR)
KW - Lexical tone
KW - Linguistic abstraction
KW - Neural speech encoding
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85058942766&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85058942766&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3758/s13414-018-1621-9
DO - 10.3758/s13414-018-1621-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 30565097
AN - SCOPUS:85058942766
SN - 1943-3921
VL - 81
SP - 1020
EP - 1033
JO - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
JF - Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
IS - 4
ER -